The business side of photography
Job priorities for running your photo business:
1. You’re a photographer.
No that’s wrong.
Joseph Pasonault’s family moved from Newfoundland to the US, circa 1882, when he was six years old. In 1896, a twenty-year-old Pasonault opened his first photo studio in Cando. He later moved his studio to a larger town in North Dakota.
Canada’s pandemic case numbers today (April 2022) are the highest than at any time in the first year-and-a-half of the pandemic when everyone was panicking and hoarding toilet paper. But no one is panicking today and, figuratively speaking, the news media is no longer reporting in all caps. What’s changed?
Sooner or later there will be a demand for photography services again. It may still be several months away but photographers should do a few things now to be ready.
Customers may require photographers to wear face masks. Some local governments may require everyone to wear a face mask in all indoor locations. Be prepared for this now by buying some face masks.
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Every professional photographer knows how to minimize risk: carry a backup camera, have extra batteries and memory cards, tape down cables, don’t overload a boom arm, etc. But what about minimizing risk to your cleanliness?
After 30 years of photographing in locations like hospitals, seniors’ homes, prisons, food processing plants, drug manufacturing sites, pharmaceutical labs, commercial kitchens and in countless private homes, here are a few little things I’ve learned.
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The GDPR. You’ve probably heard of it.
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is now one year old. It affects every business or organization, anywhere in the world, that markets to people in the European Union (EU). It applies to anyone who uses personal information of EU citizens for business or public sector purposes.
The aim of the GDPR is to protect all EU citizens from privacy and data breaches in today’s data-driven world.
– GDPR
The GDPR not only applies to organisations located within the EU but also applies to organisations located outside of the EU if they offer goods or services to, or monitor the behaviour of, EU data subjects. It applies to all companies processing and holding the personal data of data subjects residing in the European Union, regardless of the company’s location.
– GDPR FAQ
If you thought your home office was small or ugly, here is someone’s “vintage” 42-square-foot home office before it gets renovated. It has no functioning lights or heat. But it does have lots of nails in a wall, a very sloping floor and a sewage pipe in the corner. I didn’t ask about the dark red stains on the floor.
A small financial consulting company last week sent me four business portraits they wanted fixed. Another photographer shot these portraits three months ago and I don’t know why he or she didn’t fix the photos.
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Just wanted to point out that the Canadian government has posted its 2019 kilometric rates for car travel by government employees.
These rates are the bare minimum of what photographers should be charging for use of their vehicle.
Your situation may require you to charge more. For example, it costs me about 85¢/km to drive my car. This is much higher than the government’s 57¢/km (including tax) for Ontario.
Please check the date of this article because it contains information that may become out of date. Tax regulations, sales tax rules, copyright laws and privacy laws can change from time to time. Always check with proper government sources for up-to-date information.
